Site Mobile Navigation

The Mark of Cane

“Take off your jacket; everything out of your pockets,” the officer said. “Now. Everything.” I stripped my jacket inside out and fumbled through my jeans, torn receipts fluttering to the carpet as I emptied my pockets. I dumped everything on the table in front of me: wallet, phone, eyedrops, matches, lighter.

“Do you smoke?” he asked. “No, sir,” I replied, though it wasn’t strictly true. Even more suspicious now, he asked again. Our bus, full of weary travelers, idled outside. A routine border-check in upstate New York had turned into a back-room interrogation, and I was worried, because the three friends I was traveling with didn’t respond to authority well. I could almost hear the wry grins cracking their faces as the officers peacocked. “Is U.S. Customs a joke to you?” one officer asked. My friend Alex said, “No law against smiling, sir.”

In order to defuse the situation, I had to convince them I was blind.

By that time, at 22, I’d been legally blind for a few years, the result of several failed retinal detachment surgeries. I had a white cane, but I never used it. Once, alone and lost in downtown Washington, I unfolded it, immediately sweating as I felt hundreds of eyes shift onto me. A man who was panhandling grabbed me and showed me the way home.

It made an impression, but it wasn’t enough to sell me on it. The cane stayed in storage. To me, it signified defeat, so I kept it out of sight at college, social events, job interviews — everywhere.

After college, I moved to San Francisco. My vision became worse, but I still took pride in faking normal — even if it caused more problems. At restaurants, I’d ask about the menu, and waiters would point to it, exasperated. I never tipped for coffee, because I couldn’t locate the tip jar. I failed to yield on dark sidewalks, terrifying fellow pedestrians. And I was tortured by my inability to recognize faces. I imagined my reputation crashing and burning as I passed acquaintances on the street, unwittingly snubbing them.

Late one night, desperate and unable to find a restroom, I ducked into a quiet parking lot to relieve myself. Voices shouted at me through the darkness. I turned to flee but couldn’t move fast enough. Soon I was sitting on the curb, staring blankly as two police officers informed me that I had urinated on their station house. They didn’t believe I was blind. (“Where’s your stick?”) Before my day in court, I had already quit my job at a local alt weekly and bought a plane ticket east.

Photo

Will ButlerCredit
Molly DeCoudreaux

I spent two weeks in Montreal with my cousin. There I began casually mentioning my eyesight, trying on the words like a funny hat, noticing how it made things smoother. Montreal in the summer is a vortex of decadent food, 24-ounce cocktails and carefree people. We reveled in it, danced, swam in fountains. I tripped, stumbled, misidentified people; leaned on friends for support; gripped their shirttails to be led through the crowd.

After a few friends visited me in Canada, I traveled with them back to New York, sleeping off a string of endless nights in the back of a Greyhound bus. When the officers shook us awake at the border, the rest of the bus was empty. I staggered down the stairs, unsure of where to go.

In line at passport control, we joked, still a bit buzzed from the night before. We smelled like cigars and garbage but otherwise hadn’t committed any offense. We might have cruised through if it weren’t for me, leaning on my much smaller friend for support and guidance. My pupils were wide enough to practically eclipse my irises. This disorientation was ordinary for me, but to the customs officers, it most likely read as some psychoactive state.

Even as I tried to explain my medical condition, they pressed me on everything. As we sat on the cheap plastic chairs in the back room, I imagined our bus revving up and pulling away, separating us from our belongings — most of all my white cane, folded at the bottom of my backpack, which now seemed so valuable. They eventually let us go, but I knew then that I couldn’t try to fake it anymore. So I stopped. When I emerged from the Port Authority Bus Terminal that day with the cane, the world was different, kinder.

They say you “go” blind — the way you’d “go” AWOL or “go” crazy, as if consigned to a place apart, dark, ringing of solitude and isolation. But it’s much more an arrival than a departure.

Will Butler is a writer in Berkeley, Calif.

Email submissions for Lives to lives@nytimes.com. Because of the volume of email, the magazine cannot respond to every submission.

A version of this article appears in print on June 1, 2014, on Page MM50 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Mark of Cane. Today's Paper|Subscribe